George Henry Crumb Jr. was born on 24 October 1929 in Charleston, West Virginia, into a family that played chamber music together: his father a clarinettist in the Charleston Symphony Orchestra as well as a conductor for silent film, teacher, copyist and arranger, his mother a cellist in the same orchestra. He began composing early, and two of his orchestral works were played by the Charleston Symphony while he was still a teenager. He studied at the National Music Camp at Interlochen in 1947 and majored in music at Mason College. He died on 6 February 2022.

He rejected serialism early and built a personal language out of extended techniques and unusual timbres, and though his few large works include Echoes of Time and the River, which won the 1968 Pulitzer Prize, and Star-Child, which won a Grammy in 2001, most of his output is for chamber forces or solo players. Black Angels (1970) for electric string quartet responds to the Vietnam War, Ancient Voices of Children (1970) sets García Lorca — one of eleven Lorca settings — and Vox Balaenae (1971) evokes the humpback whale for electric flute, electric cello and amplified piano; the four volumes of Makrokosmos (1972–79) answer Bartók’s Mikrokosmos. His scores are published as facsimiles of his manuscript, the staves bent into arches and circles, and quotations from Bach, Chopin, Schubert, Strauss and Thelonious Monk run through the music. Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, Christopher Rouse and Melinda Wagner were among his students.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Crumb
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q356804